Antarctica Melts Away

Three-fourths of the way into Antarctica! Which Is To Say Nowhere at the Yale Summer Cabaret, a decked-out Rena (Ricardo Dávila, in drag) explains to the audience what she perceives as the American way. One, she declares, weaving through the theater with her head cocked high: You have the über-wealthy one percent, who are so afraid of losing their footing with rising taxes that they force those below them to work harder, then harder still, without a reasonable rise in pay or social stature.

Two: there’s a shrinking middle class, working their asses off for the aforementioned über-wealthy.

Three: There are the poor, who can work and work but never quite rise above their circumstances because the system is so deeply rigged against them. 

For anyone in the audience who is even half-woke, it’s a speech with a thesis that feels familiar before it’s even delivered. There’s some silence in the room, a few laughs and sighs as the audience waits for Rena to delve deeper, to get beneath the problem’s skin in a meaningful way. She never does.

Such is the plight of Antarctica, on at the Yale Summer Cab now through Sunday evening. A contemporary adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s 1896 Ubu Roi by Yale MFA candidate Miranda Rose Hall, the work lends an absurdist lens to the very real and pressing problem of global warming, making pit stops in American poverty, politics, and policymaking along the way.

The good news is that Hall and director Elizabeth Dinkova have taken on an ambitious and timely project, joining the Cab’s robust history of getting at systemic issues through inventive theater. The bad news is that they don’t quite get to what Dinkova sees as making ​“people very aware of some of the most disturbing aspects of the world we live in.” Instead, audience members — assumed to be a far more blasé and cursory bunch than they actually are — get a series of half-baked lectures about the fact that the planet is rapidly warming and society is stratified. New Haven and its residents, temporary and townie alike, have been having this conversation in advanced, challenging and scientific ways for several years now, especially after hurricanes Irene and Sandy. Hall’s approach sells the audience short.

The Cab, in both academic year and summer iterations, embraces a permission to fail, and takes it on with panache. In its weird and wacky structure, Ubu Roi — a 19th-century Macbeth turned on its head, with allusions to power-grabbing, greed and gluttony that have aged extremely well — is kind of the perfect play onto which to map a tale about the disastrous effects of global warming. It’s no wonder, then, that the actors rise valiantly to the challenge, giving their all — sometimes nonverbally — in a series of synchronized dance numbers, hyperbolic monologues, slow-motion stage fights, political rants, and rock interludes that channel Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.

Beyond Rena (Dávila), Roy (Marié Botha), and a ruthless Linda who looks like great fun to play (Emily Reeder), the play’s highlight is its rotating cast of Arctic creatures, who waddle around the stage trying to escape Roy’s gluttonous plans for them. In particular, Patrick Foley’s commitment to character (that is, as a penguin) leaves the audience smiling, while Steven Johnson surprises as Freddy, a new take on Jarry’s crown prince Bougrelas. Delightful too is one of the season’s creatives, Sarah Neitfeld, whose light shines especially bright with costume and puppet design that captures some of Jarry’s original spirit.

But the script itself, much like the ice floes on which it unfolds, melts out from under the play’s feet. A lot of Jarry’s structure is maintained: Like Ubu and his wife, middle manager Roy and his wife Rena are more or less content with their lives until a fortune cookie offers Rena an alternate reality: She who controls Antarctica controls the world. What comes next is a journey into a fantastical and terrifying world that isn’t so different from our own, in which humans leave their ruinous fingerprints everywhere they go. Penguin massacres, political commentary, coarse scene changes, and surreal aural and visual shifts disappear into a tepid Antarctic stew as the continent’s waters rise.

But Hall has the opportunity to dig really deep into an environmental (and social) problem — as Cab seasons have done with exquisite grace, humor, and experiment — and she misses the chance, claiming both Jarry and Brecht’s legacies a little prematurely. Antarctica comes off as disingenuous, or perhaps overwhelmed in its 90-minute running time by the disastrous consequences of a poor environmental policy and poorer American governing.

What we’re supposed to do at the end of the evening is laugh at ourselves, and hear in that laughter the change we want to make. In a city where people actually are working on global warming (and food insecurity, labor inequity, and subsidized housing), no script needs to over-explain these things. We’ve been doing them for a while already.

Antarctica! Which Is To Say Nowhere runs through July 10 at the Yale Summer Cabaret, 217 Park St. Visit the Cab’s website for tickets and more information.